Italy is most beautiful in winter

Monopoli is an elegant little seaside town in Puglia, the heel of the Italian boot, and in summer it’s unbearable. Tourists flock from everywhere. Squares you could normally zip through in a few seconds take ten minutes to cross, and the queues for Bella Blu, the ice cream parlour in Piazza Garibaldi, remind you of the Ryanair check-in desk. That struggling little pizzeria you patronised loyally throughout the autumn and winter now asks you to come back in an hour’s time and still can’t find you a table when you do. Monopoli, which seemed to be begging for it on every previous visit, suddenly has options. It’s offhand with you, looks at its watch and plays hard to get.

Luckily, I was here in winter this time. The town was quiet, hotels empty and affordable. On the train ride here from Bari, the Puglian landscape had been suffused in a thick December mist – something I didn’t imagine happened in southern Italy. Even the palm trees stood out in silhouette. Puglia’s citizens were coated, bandaged against the cold.

You can see why, in season, so many people come to Monopoli, not least from the snooty north. There’s a charming old town with ivory-coloured cobbles, flaking white buildings, cool, musty alleyways and a host of churches and monasteries. At the centre of it is a harbour dotted with quaint blue fishing boats and beyond, with a great modern jetty sticking way out to sea, the navy Adriatic, crystalline enough to see the fish. Here, along the city walls, the waves usually slapping gently against them, is a long promenade, with more ancient white fishermen’s houses, little scraps of seaweed-smelling beach, and a coastal fortress, the Castello di Carlo V (now a museum), built in the 16th century and still looking quite pristine.

Nearby restaurants dish up the fiery spaghetti all’assassina (noodles slowly fried with chillis and tomato paste, a pleasant blend of chew, crunch and anguish) or braciole (Puglian meat rolls stuffed with cheese, herbs and pine nuts, trussed up and stewed). There are cafes serving cappuccinos in the morning and the simple caffè (a centimetre, if that, of thick, acrid espresso) in the afternoons, their counters and shelves piled high with lottery tickets, panettone cakes, Bacio chocolates and liqueurs like limoncello or Amaretto Disaronno.

On pavement corners, young men and old men stand about smoking (sometimes cigarettes, sometimes those gnarled-looking Toscanello cigars) in drainpipe jeans and padded jackets. Nearly everyone, male or female, is wearing sunglasses, lending them an air of mystery, quite possibly unearned. John Hooper, in his book The Italians, queries whether shades are worn in Italy purely as defence against the sun. Citing national suspicion and paranoia, the universal fear of letting your guard down, he asks:

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Could it be that some Italians like sunglasses for the same reason that poker players do? … Anyone who can hide the expression in their eyes is giving him- or herself an advantage in the delicate interactions that are the stuff of life in Italy.

There’s much to see in Monopoli through those tinted lenses. The new town, like the old, is a pretty place, full of pastel-coloured houses with green shutters and balconies, and streets whose pine trees sometimes meet in an arch overhead. Fiat 500s and Pandas zip about, there are glass-walled pavement huts for outdoor drinking and everywhere, it seems, the town’s rich are walking their chic little poodles. In the early mornings, cleaning vehicles hose down the streets with a liquid which seems to flood central Monopoli with the smell of Palmolive soap. Though it may be an illusion – Italy, after all, is the country of illusions – you’re struck everywhere by a sense of civic pride. Who was the mayor of this town? I wondered. He was, it turned out, one Angelo Annese, a jolly, up-and-coming-looking fellow with hair slicked back in a mullet. Though he faced corruption charges in 2023, you’d be faintly disappointed if he hadn’t given this is southern Italy.

Annese’s not the only one to have felt the heat. In summer here, you’re scorched and blinded by the Latin sun and, unless you’re beautiful or Italian, want to stay indoors. But in winter Monopoli has many moods. On New Year’s Eve, when I arrived here, the town was festooned with hanging fairy lights, the local Michelangelo café doing a roaring trade in hot chocolate and whipped cream, and there was an ice rink for kids – complete with disco soundtrack and a magic, fairy-lit tunnel.

On the other, packed with townsfolk of every generation, there was a New Year’s concert, with dry ice, a light show and a countdown to 2025. At the stroke of midnight, people lit sparklers, set off rockets and began to dance on the edge of the fountain. Couples clutched sentimentally at each other and school kids – pleased to bump into each other in the holidays – stood about gossiping like grandees. To the sounds of Volare, sung with a roar by the crowd, an informal conga started up, into which strangers like me were quickly (and willingly) dragged. It was everything you imagine an Italian new year will be and, given 31 December was well outside the tourist season, I felt I was seeing Monopoli at its most stripped back.

On other days of this time of year, there’s too much reality. A damp wind rampages through the streets off the Mediterranean, heavy rain makes for shoe-soaking gutter lagoons, and the sea, suddenly angry and Atlantic-looking, crashes violently against the fortifications. It’s bleak as hell, but perhaps a good reminder that Italy isn’t just la dolce vita, nor infused top to toe with the spirit of Roberto Benigni. A ‘sort of sadness,’ wrote Ignazio Silone, ‘has always prevailed among intelligent Italians, but most of them, to evade suicide or madness, have taken to every known means of escape…’

That Italy could be as melancholy as Eastern Europe, I realised, on my last Saturday there, standing on my apartment balcony. The sky, though rainless, was a sullied sheet, the sea the colour of lumps of broken glass. At Monopoli FC football stadium the switched-off floodlights stood out above the town like sentinels. It was early afternoon, the shops had closed, and people had retreated to their shuttered apartments to eat, snooze or perhaps watch a Totò comedy on RAI. This was Monopoli, slumped in its great overcast annual siesta. All was still, all silent, and in the far distance – the only sign of movement – a figure in black was making his way slowly along the promontory, with its rocky sides and strange industrial buildings. Trees had shed their autumn leaves and the Christmas lights wrapped round them now burned, unobserved, for no one but themselves. You could keep high summer and all its gaudy pleasures. This, for me, was as beautiful, and touching, as Monopoli ever got.